SEQUIM — The “lavender legend” goes like this:
In early 1995, while four women were returning from Forks, one of them divulged that she had recently ordered 300 lavender plants and planned to sell the results at a little shop on her Woodcock Road property.
Her companions were excited by the idea, but she asked them to keep it quiet.
Nevertheless, lavender shortly turned up in a local news article looking at ways to invigorate area agriculture, which led to excited public meetings and, eventually, successful lavender farms, a new value-added agriculture industry and a little tourism event known as the Sequim Lavender Festival.
All of that happened, according to Betty Oppenheimer’s 2002 book, Growing Lavender and Community on the Sequim Prairie: A How-to and History.
But it was also more complicated than that, with the Dungeness Valley’s agricultural heritage and the mechanics of development and population growth playing a part.
Keeping open space viable
There was also an agenda: Harnessing the same market dynamics that continue to drive up the cost of area real estate and using them to make the preservation of open space economically viable.
“Sequim has a really unique situation,” said Barbara Hanna, who owns Lost Mountain Lavender Farm with her husband, Gary.
“This was a conscious community effort.”
That effort took shape in the 1990s as farming in the area declined and the pace of development sped up, Oppenheimer wrote, noting that the Sequim area was losing farmland much faster than the national average — from 76,000 acres down to 20,000 over 50 years, a 75-percent drop.
People wanted to retain that rural heritage, however.
“In what seems to have been a combination of many ideas converging at once,” wrote Oppenheimer, “civic leaders, farmers and enthusiastic land and business owners all began hearing about … farm cooperatives, the image of colorful fields of flowers and the idea of creating an identity through which the town of Sequim could promote tourism.”
Subdivision led to flowers
Subdivided land helped lead the way to flowers, said Tom Mix, president of the Sequim Growers Cooperative.
People with a five-acre tract found that it was “too small to plow, too big to mow,” and sought some other use for the property.
There also was a powerful property tax incentive for agricultural use of property, he said. Anyone who meets a modest income threshold for farming activity on their land gets a significant tax break.
“You can’t quite do it with hay,” he said, but many niche-oriented crops — specialized seed crops or organic produce, for example — can produce the needed return.
Lavender can, too.